TERRAFORMING TERRA
We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Goblin Tunnels

Long an enthusiastic reader of fantasy
literature and its sting of iconic other races of humanoids, I never suspected
an actual physical reality to the idea of goblin tunnels.Here we discover there are hundreds of these shallow
workings built in communities during the early Christian period before the emergence
of a doctrine of actual soul migration on death which appears to have ended the
practice.

We learn today two things:

1It was fashionable to build in good ground a hidden
tunnel to plausibly provide a mystery access to the underworld.It remained secret and we can be sure that
the local religious leaders were not too proud of them

2Our present ideas of the soul’s options after death
emerge around 1000 Ad which is a whole millennia after the life of Jesus.These ideas remain rather popular and inform
all discussion on spiritualism and the paranormal generally.

This is really quite a
surprise.The tunnels themselves are
surely just what we have said in terms of time and place.The iron plowshare alone makes it no earlier
than early medieval when the Germans cut down the forests and put their soils
to the iron plow.It fueled the first
real industrial revolution as populations exploded and migration rolled out.

I personally inherited a whiff of
those times from my father whose family resided in a village in the Carpathians
named Neu Hau or ‘new clearing!’ dated from the mid thirteenth century or
so.

There are more than 700 curious tunnel networks in Bavaria, but their purpose remains a
mystery. Were they built as graves for the souls of the dead, as ritual spaces
or as hideaways from marauding bandits? Archeologists are now exploring the
subterranean vaults to unravel their secrets.

Beate Greithanner, a dairy farmer, is barefoot as she walks up the lush
meadows of the Doblberg, a mountain in Bavaria
set against a backdrop of snow-capped Alpine peaks. She stops and points to a
hole in the ground. "This is where the cow was grazing," she says.
"Suddenly she fell in, up to her hips."

A crater had opened up beneath the unfortunate cow.

On the day after the bovine mishap, Greithanner's husband Rudi examined
the hole. He was curious, so he poked his head inside and craned his neck to
peer into the darkness. Could it be a hiding place for some sort of treasure,
he wondered? As he climbed into the hole to investigate, it turned out to be a
narrow, damp tunnel that led diagonally into the earth, like the bowels of some
giant dinosaur.

Suddenly the farmer could no longer hear anything from above. He
panicked when he realized that it was getting difficult to breathe the stifling
air -- and quickly ended his brief exploration.

The Greithanners, from the town of Glonn
near Munich,
are the owners of a strange subterranean landmark. A labyrinth of vaults known
as an "Erdstall" runs underneath their property. It is at least 25
meters (82 feet) long and likely stems from the Middle Ages. Some believe that
it was built as a dwelling for helpful goblins.

The geologists and land surveyors who appeared on Greithanner's
property at the end of June were determined to get to the bottom of the
mystery. Three members of a group called the "Working Group for Erdstall
Research," wearing red protective suits and helmets, dragged the heavy
concrete plate away from the entrance and disappeared into the depths.

Their leader, Dieter Ahlborn, began by crawling through a passageway
only about 70 centimeters (2 foot 3 inches) high. His colleague Andreas
Mittermüller had to return to the surface when the lack of oxygen in the tunnel
gave him a headache. Ahlborn continued crawling into the space until his lamp
revealed a decayed piece of wood.

He picked it up as if it were a precious stone, knowing that it could
offer an important clue about the age of the manmade cave.

Meanwhile, in the meadow above, a group from the State Office of
Historic Preservation in Munich
had marked off the site with colored tape. Then they rolled a three-wheeled
cart equipped with ground-penetrating radar across the grass. "The gallery
has collapsed at the back," one member of the group explains. "We're
figuring out its actual size."

The exploration of the site is a pioneering activity, marking the first
time an archeological agency in Germany
is showing an interest in an extremely unusual ancient phenomenon. Similar
small underground labyrinths have been found across Europe, from Hungary to Spain, but no one knows why they
were built.

At least 700 of these chambers have been found in Bavaria
alone, along with about 500 in Austria.
In the local vernacular, they have fanciful names such as
"Schrazelloch" ("goblin hole") or "Alraunenhöhle"
("mandrake cave"). They were supposedly built by elves, and legend
has it that gnomes lived inside. According to some sagas, they were parts of
long escape tunnels from castles.

In reality, the tunnels are often only 20 to 50 meters long. The larger
passageways are big enough so that people can walk through them in a hunched
position, but some tunnels are so small that explorers have to get down on all
fours. The tiniest passageways, known as "Schlupfe"
("slips"), are barely 40 centimeters (16 inches) in diameter.

The ground beneath the southern German state of Bavaria is literally perforated with these
underground mazes -- and no one knows why.

Many galleries are connected to the sites of former settlements. The
tunnel entrances are sometimes located in the kitchens of old farmhouses, near
churches and cemeteries or in the middle of a forest. The atmosphere inside is
dark and oppressive, much as it would be inside an animal den.

'Completely Hushed Up'

For those curious to see what it's like inside the tunnels, innkeeper
Vinzenz Wösner offers tours, or "guided crawls," in Münzkirchen, a
town in northern Austria.

The tour begins in the taproom and proceeds down a stone stairway into
the cider cellar, where there is a trap door that opens into a gaping hole.
"We don't let people with heart conditions do the tour," Wösner says
in his thick Austrian accent. He keeps a large sling on hand for emergencies,
so that if anyone faints he can pull them out of the narrow tunnel.

The vaults could not have served a practical purpose, as dwellings or
to store food, for example, if only because the tunnels are so inconveniently
narrow in places. Besides, some fill up with water in the winter. Also, the
lack of evidence of feces indicates that they were not used to house livestock.

There is not a single written record of the construction of an Erdstall
dating from the medieval period. "The tunnels were completely hushed
up," says Ahlborn.

Archeologists have also been surprised to find that the tunnels are
almost completely empty and appear to be swept clean, as if they were abodes
for the spirits. One gallery contained an iron plowshare, while heavy
millstones were found in three others. Virtually nothing else has turned up in
the vaults.

Until recently, the secret caves were explored only by amateur
archeologists. The pioneer of Erdstall exploration, Lambert Karner (1841 to
1909), was a priest. According to his records, he crawled through 400 vaults,
lit only by flickering candlelight, with "strange winding passages"
through which "one can often only force oneself like a worm."

The tunnels later became the realm of local historians armed with vivid
imaginations. They speculated that the caves were used as "winter quarters
by the Teutonic tribes" or as dungeons for the disabled. Some of today's
more esoteric souls interpret them as "spaces of nonbeing."

Now Ahlborn wants to finally apply the more precise tools of science to
the vaults. Under his leadership, the Erdstall working group has developed into
a serious and effective group of experts. It includes cave researchers,
geography teachers and engineers like Nikolaus Arndt, who has built subways in India
and pipelines for fossil groundwater through the Libyan deserts for Gadhafi.

At their annual meeting, the amateur explorers combine shoptalk with
bold subterranean expeditions. To avoid suffocating, says one member of the
group, they recently blew air into a tunnel with a "reversible vacuum
cleaner."

An exhibition in the Bavarian city of Passau now makes the subject of these
mysterious galleries more accessible to a broader public. One of the hands-on
exhibits is a tunnel made of plywood. Posters refer to the actual tunnels as
"Central Europe's last great
mystery."

The show is generating urgently needed attention. Road and construction
crews often stumble upon subterranean galleries, and not knowing what they are,
promptly fill them up with dirt.

The owner of the biggest complex in Germany, which is 125 meters long,
built a swimming pool above it. Arndt calls it "a disgrace." However,
some 90 percent of the catacombs are still believed to be intact and
undiscovered.

The story of Josef Wasmeier from Beutelsbach in Lower
Bavaria shows how difficult it is to track them down. There was
once a castle not far from his farmstead. It was torn down in the 18th century,
and now there is a grove of locust trees on the site.

"According to the legend, there were escape tunnels emanating from
the castle hill," says Wasmeier. He and a few friends decided to search
for the tunnels. They dug and drilled, day in and day out. "In the end,
the only one still digging was Rudi Eichschmied -- every evening, sometimes in
the moonlight," says Wasmeier.

The man finally came across an underground cavity.

It led to a unique gallery with walls made of sand. Initially the tunnel
went down vertically for 4 meters, and then it continued in a zigzag pattern.
There was a narrow "Schlupf" section at the end of the labyrinth. It
reminds the researchers of a vagina.

Wasmeier once took a group of female healers down into his cave. The
women slid headlong through the tunnel, in complete darkness, as if passing
through a birth canal.

The farmer sometimes feels a sense of reverence when he goes into his
tunnel. "You feel like a Hopi Indian inside," he says. "They too
used to sit in caves in the hope of finding answers."

Part 2: 'Gateways to the Underworld'

But how old is the vault? The members of the task force were so eager
to find an answer that they paid for pollen analyses out of their own pockets.

A few radiocarbon dating analyses have also been performed, and they
indicate that the galleries date back to the 10th to the 13th century. Bits of
charcoal recovered from the Erdstall tunnels in Höcherlmühle date back to the
period between 950 and 1050 A.D.

Heinrich Kusch, a prehistorian from the Austrian city of Graz, believes
that these results are incorrect. He suspects that some of the subterranean
systems were built about 5,000 years ago, in the Neolithic period. For several
years now, he has been probing Austria's
Steiermark region with giant drills for "gateways to the underworld."

But Kusch's theory has lost some of its appeal. All of the radiocarbon
dating analyses completed to date indicate that the tunnels were built in the
Middle Ages, challenging the validity of the prevailing school of thought. It
holds that the tunnels were built during the Migration Period (known as the
"Völkerwanderung" in German) in the 5th and 6th centuries, when
entire tribes left their homes and abandoned the cemeteries of their ancestors.
The assumption was that the tunnels and galleries were created so that the dead
could still be venerated.

It is clear, at any rate, that they were built by professionals. They
dug the tunnels in a kneeling position, using wedge-shaped tools held with both
hands. Every few meters, they chiseled cavities into the walls for their oil
lamps. They dug the longer passageways in serpentine form to reduce the
pressure from the surrounding earth. Supporting planks were not used.

Around the year 1200, the underground labyrinths were filled in and
the entrances blocked with rubble. The rubble contained ceramics clearly
attributable to the Gothic period.

The confusion over the tunnels is hardly surprising. Some believe that
they were used as dungeons for criminals, while others see them as places of
healing, where the sick could cast off their afflictions. Still others
speculate that they were used by druids.

As a result of the international cooperation of the Erdstall working
group, new clues have come to light. The galleries are also concentrated in
parts of Ireland and Scotland, and there are also clusters in central
France.

This distribution bears intriguing parallels to the routes of the
Irish-Scottish traveling monks who, coming from the Celtic north in the 6th
century, traveled across the continent as missionaries. The tattooed monks made
the passage to the continent from the islands, carrying long staffs and wearing
coarse habits.

The legendary Kilian, born in Ireland
around 640 A.D., preached in the southern German city of Würzburg. According to a hagiography, angry
natives killed him and buried him in a stable. St. Gall (died 640 A.D.) made it
as far as LakeConstance.

Ahlborn speculates that these early Christian missionaries also brought
along heathen ideas, the remnants of Druid scholarship or special Celtic
concepts of the afterlife, which led to the construction of the subterranean
galleries.

Perhaps the tunnels were also prisons for demons, evil dwarves and the
undead. Some galleries contain traces of building stones and remnants of doors
or locks. A sandstone relief was found in an Erdstall at Bösenreutin near the
town of Lindau on LakeConstance.
It depicts a goblin with a tail attached to its rump.

Were the galleries temples for the superstitious?

Hiding from Bandits

Not everyone finds these spiritual interpretations convincing. Josef
Weichenberger can only shake his head when he hears them. He is talking himself
into a rage as he speeds from the Bavarian city of Passau
toward the Waldviertel region in Lower Austria.
"The cult theories are completely erroneous."

Then he offers his interpretation: "The Erdstall galleries were
simply hiding places."

Weichenberger's opinion carries some weight. An archivist by
profession, he has been crawling through the labyrinths for the last 34 years.
He also runs an alarm center from his office. When construction workers report
the discovery of an Erdstall, he rushes to the site to document it with a
compass and a measuring tape.

For this mole of a man, no tunnel is too narrow and no passageway too
moist or dirty.

According to Weichenberger, the galleries in his native Austria were
built during the "medieval clearing period" in the 11th century. At
the time, settlers from Bavaria traveled down
the Danube to cultivate land in the east.

Armed with hatchets, they cut swaths into the wilderness. It was not an
entirely safe undertaking. Magyars flooded into the area around 1042. Around
1700, the Hungarian rebels known as Kurucs, with the backing of the Ottoman
Turks, ransacked the countryside.

Robbers also posed a threat in the region. They raided remote villages
and used crowbars to get into the houses. Weichenberger believes that the
farmers quickly fled underground "from this vermin," taking their
valuables with them.

In Weichenberger's version of the mystery of the subterranean
galleries, the terrified villagers would sit in their hiding places
underground, their hearts pounding, while the intruders raged above ground,
searching in vain for valuables.

He also offers written evidence. "An old account of a death tells
the story of a woman who was so afraid of being discovered that she suffocated
her screaming baby in an Erdstall."

With his talk of "murder," "bandits" and people
"shaking in terror as they hid underground," Weichenberger makes
ancient Austria
sound like a lawless region not unlike the Wild West. "That's just the way
it was," he says, as he continues to drive eastward. It's the same route
the settlers once followed as they cleared the forests in the east.

After four hours on the road, we approach the Kleinzwettl fortified
church. The ruins once included a drawbridge and a circular rampart. As
churches go, it must have been a veritable fortress.

There is also a system of passageways directly beneath the church. When
he surveyed it last November, Weichenberger determined that it was 62 meters
long. The entrance is under the granite cobblestones in the sanctuary.

A special permit is needed to enter the dim vault, because of the
danger of collapse. At first, we make our way through a muddy, serpentine
passageway.

The tunnel gradually becomes narrower. A water leak has transformed the
rear section into a mud pit. Water drips from the ceiling. The thought of the
heavy church columns resting on the ground above is terrifying.

"It's certainly a little uncomfortable here," Weichenberger
admits, "but the people were desperate to stay alive."

To substantiate his theory, Weichenberger even hazarded a survival
experiment. He and two colleagues were locked into an Erdstall for 48 hours.
The oxygen monitors were soon beeping and the candles they had brought along
started flickering oddly. The men dozed away, and whenever breathing became too
difficult they crawled into other tunnels. The test was a success.

But what does it prove?

"Some galleries were indeed used as hiding places, but only much
later," says Ahlborn, promptly dismissing his rival's theory. "They
were also uses as toilets and refuse pits."

Austrian spelunker Edith Bednarik is also certain that the convoluted
grottoes could not have been used as hiding places. She offers several
arguments to support her case. For one, there are hardly any larger chambers
where people could have stayed. The galleries have no "emergency
exits," and if there were a fire they would have become "deadly
traps." Besides, the smallest tunnels were too narrow for pregnant women.

Besides, if the terrified villagers were tightly packed into the
subterranean vaults during attacks, why did nothing fall out of anyone's
pockets? There are no food remains or traces of torches.

For these reasons, most experts attribute a sacred and ritual function
to the underground landmarks. Many find the idea of a "chamber of
souls" particularly attractive.

According to this theory, the galleries were essentially waiting rooms
in which the souls of the dead were to spend the period until the Second Coming
of Christ -- the Day of Judgment, when Jesus Christ would judge "the
living and the dead."

It wasn't until the 12th century that the theology of purgatory
became established, which made it possible for souls to become purified. This
meant that good people could ascend to heaven right away. The caves would have
been useless at that time, which corresponds to the period when they were
filled in.

But even this view doesn't explain why the sacred vaults were kept such
a secret. And why are there no Erdstalls in Switzerland
or in the Black Forest?

For now, the mystery must remain unsolved. "We could use the help
of physicists with radiocarbon dating expertise, theologists and specialists in
prehistoric mining," says Ahlborn. Not a single doctoral thesis has been
written on the subject to date. The dark tunnels are still virtually unknown
among academics.

This doesn't trouble farmer Josef Wasmeier. He loves his Erdstall,
particularly because of its mysterious aura. Sometimes he crawls into his sandy
private cave for half an hour in the evening and meditates. It's
"completely quiet" inside, he says, dark and distant like a womb.

"And when I climb back up again, the stars seem so bright you feel
you could almost touch them."

No comments:

About Me

Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.